It started several weeks ago, around the time of a specially-called Warner Robins city council meeting where many believe council members discussed police Chief Brett Evans' future with the department in a closed session.
After the closed session, Mayor Randy Toms approached Evans and said "I'm gonna have a conversation with Chief Evans, everything's fine right now, but we've got a lot of work to do." The two then shook hands before Toms left city hall without answering any more questions.
More recently, councilwoman Carolyn Robbins said Evans has 60 days to hire five white and five black officers.
Other council members were not as specific when they discussed the matter.
However, we wanted to verify if even a hypothetical policy with a quota like that could withstand a legal challenge.
Kathy Harrington-Sullivan, a partner at the Atlanta-based employment law firm Barrett and Farahany, said a policy focused on white and black officers would necessarily exclude other minority groups.
"They would be liable for litigation by excluded employees, any minority who felt they were excluded from the process by this policy," she said.
She added that it could even violate the nation's highest law.
"It's also potentially a violation of constitutional law and the equal protection clause," said Harrington-Sullivan.
Warner Robins city attorney Jim Elliott said he doesn't know exactly what council has and has not discussed on the matter, but in general agreed that a specific racial quota hiring policy would be tough to pull off.
"There's a lot of potential for racial discrimination, unlawful racial discrimination in a plan like that," said Elliott.
However, Elliott said a quota policy could be legal if certain circumstances were met.
Specifically, he said the city would have to prove that a department had a historically discriminatory hiring policy, tailor the quota to remedy it, and maintain the quota only until the number of employees in the discriminated-against group rose to the desired level.
"So there'd be quite a few hoops to jump through before you'd get to the point where that would be a lawful plan," said Elliott.
Harrington-Sullivan said even then, the policy would be legally risky if it applied only to some minority groups, instead of all minorities.
So we can verify that a racial hiring quota would carry legal risks.
Warner Robins police spokesperson Jennifer Parson said the department is doing all it can to hire qualified officers.